Part 1: Hair of the Head

I was in fourth grade, working my way along the cafeteria line, when the white-smocked woman who served up my portion of fish sticks said, “Do you know you have a receding hairline?” I just blinked at her, grinning red-faced, not knowing what to say. What was that supposed to mean? I wondered, and why would she say that if it weren’t true?

I don’t think it began in fourth grade, but sometime later my hair really did begin to thin. It slowly went gray, too. It doesn’t bother me, though, losing my hair. I don’t have great hair anyway. It’s very fine and soft, but my scalp is higly productive of oil. When my hair is clean, it looks good enough. But clean only lasts a day. On the second day it’s stringy, dull, and unmanageable.

When I was in elementary school, my hair was short, as was the hair of most every boy growing up in 1950s America. My father cut my hair and that of my brothers. I’d sit in the middle of the kitchen on the gray stool he’d made in the basement, a towel draped over my shoulders and clasped at the neck with a clothespin. My dad would take the Wahl clippers and give us all crew cuts. When he went to Vietnam in 1962, my mother took over the job.

I attended a Catholic school where, back then, everyone wore uniforms and a short haircut was part of the dress code. During those days, I let a small portion in the front grow a bit longer, three-quarters of an inch, maybe. I used Butch Wax to keep that part sticking up in what I thought of as a wall. I never had a flat top. My hair wouldn’t work that way.

Later, finally away from the nuns, I let my hair grow longer. In junior high school, during the early 60s, I wore my hair swept back in a pompadour with more than a dab of Brylcreem. My future involved driving a hot rod with flames painted on the front fenders and a cool name like “Too Hot To Handle” painted on each rear fender. But that never happened. Circumstances changed, and I never got a shot at being a greaser. Besides, by the time I was a halfway through high school, I had other interests. I played in a band and wanted to look the part. But my parents wouldn’t have it. A lot of discord was the result. All that changed after high school, though. I wore it as long as I wanted, because I wanted the world to know I could do what I wanted.

Yet again, things have changed. As in the 1950s, I now keep my hair short, about a quarter inch. I cut it myself every couple of weeks, using the same clippers I bought years ago to cut my boys’ hair, just as my father did mine. Now and then Robin gives it a going over to even up spots I may have missed.

So much of a person’s identity is associated with how the hair is cut, worn, colored, and adorned. Like so many of the other things we humans do, it’s a part of our self-expression. This is who I am. This is the group I belong to. It’s been true through time and place. And, unless someone comes along powerful enough to impose and enforce an international dress code, it always will be true so long as humans are able to grow hair on their heads.

Human hair of the head grows an average of 0.4 millimeters per day. About 12 millimeters or half an inch per month. That represents a lot of rapid cell division within each of perhaps 100,000 hair follicles on the average head. New cells pack together with older ones, pushing their way up and out of the scalp, slowly dieing and filling with the protein keratin as the shaft gets longer and longer. It’s because of this rapid cellular division that one’s hair falls out during chemotherapy. As chemotherapy targets rapidly dividing cancer cells, hair cells are caught in the chemical crossfire.

Each hair goes through a growth phase of from two to as many as seven years, depending on genetics and other factors. After a short resting period, the hair falls out. It’s part of the process to lose about 100 hairs a day. No wonder it’s not unusual (however disconcerting) for a hair or two to end up in the meatloaf. For some people, as they age, many of the follicles stop functioning and hair is not replaced. Thinning hair and baldness ensues. This applies to females as well as males. Same is true for graying hair. Thinning and graying hair are signs of aging, something that no one can avoid, premature death notwithstanding.

My own hair, thinning and graying, isn’t much to identify with anymore. Unless I identify with being old. It no longer functions as an adequate head covering. I must wear a hat during the summer to keep my scalp from sunburn and in the winter to guard against heat loss. As a part of the body, it’s rather useless.